Steampunk! Part 17

In the middle of his speech, Ahfred reached for a concealed knife on one side of the chair and the escape stud on the right-hand arm.

Something shot out of the egg and splatted on Ahfred's forehead, very like the unwelcome deposit of a bird. He had an instant to crinkle his brow in surprise and puzzlement before an intense wave of agony ran through the bones of his skull and jaw and - most torturously for him - through his sensitive, sensitive ears.

Ahfred screamed. His body tensed in terrible pain. He could not grip the knife, but his fingers mashed the control stud on the chair. It rocked backward suddenly, but the panel that was supposed to open behind him slid only halfway before getting stuck. Ahfred was thrown against it rather than projected down the escape slide. He bounced off, rolled across the floor, and came to rest near the door.

As the pain ebbed, he looked up at Ruane, who had kept her place by the door.

"That was the least of the stings I could have given you," said Ruane. "It is only a temporary effect, without any lasting consequence. I have done so to establish that I will ask the questions and that you will answer, without further attempts to derail the proceedings. You may sit in the other chair."

Ahfred slowly got to his feet, his hands on his ears, and walked to the other chair. He sat down carefully and lowered his hands, wincing at the faint ringing sound of the escape panel's four springs, which were still trying to expand to their full length.

"I will continue," said Ruane. "Tell me, apart from you, who had access to the Ultimate a.r.s.enal?"

"There were three keys," said Ahfred. "Two of the three were needed to access the a.r.s.enal. I held one. Mosiah Balance V, Mistress of the Controls, had the second. The third was under the control of Kebediah Oscillation X, Distributor of Harm."

"What was in the a.r.s.enal?"

Ahfred shifted a little before he remembered and made himself be still.

"There were many things -"

Ruane pointed the weapon.

"All the weapons of the ages," gabbled Ahfred. "Every invention of multiple destruction, clockwerk and otherwise, that had hitherto been devised."

"Had any of these weapons ever been used?"

"Yes. Many of the older ones were deployed in the War of Accretion. Others had been tested, though not actually used, there being no conflict to use them in."

"The War of Accretion was in fact the last such action before the formation of the Arch-Government, twenty-seven years ago," said Ruane. "After that, there was no Rival Nation, no separate political ent.i.ties to go to war with."

"Yes."

"Was the absence of military conflict something you missed? I believe you served in the desert - in the Mechodromedary Cavalry - during the war, rising from ensign to colonel."

"I did not miss it," replied Ahfred, suppressing a shudder as the memory, so long forgotten, returned. The mechodromedaries had joints that clicked, and the ammunition for their shoulder-mounted multiguns came in bronze links that clattered as they fired, even though their magnetic propulsion was silent. Then there had been explosions, and screaming, and endless shouts. He had been forced to always wear deep earplugs and a sound-deadening spongiform helmet.

"Did Distributor Kebediah miss military conflict? She, too, served in the Accretion War, did she not?"

"Kebediah was a war hero," said Ahfred. "In the Steam a.s.sault Infantry. But I do not believe she missed the war. No."

"Mistress Mosiah, then, was the one who wished to begin some sort of war?"

Ahfred shook his head, then stopped suddenly and gaped fearfully at his interrogator.

"You are permitted to shake your head in negation or nod in the affirmative," said Ruane. "I take it you do not believe Mistress Mosiah was the instigator of the new war?"

"Mosiah was not warlike," said Ahfred. A hint of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, quickly banished. "Quite the reverse. But I don't understand. May I . . . may I be permitted to ask a question?"

"Ask."

"To what war do you refer?"

"The war that approximately ten years ago culminated in the deployment of a weapon that killed nearly everyone on Earth and has destroyed all but fragments of the Technocratic civilization. Did it start with some kind of revolt from within?"

Ahfred hesitated a moment too long. Ruane pointed the egg weapon but did not fire. The threat was enough.

"I don't think there was a revolt," said Ahfred. Small beads of sweat were forming in the corners of his eyes and starting to trickle down beside his nose. "It's difficult to remember. . . . I am old, you know . . . quite old. . . . I don't recall a war, no -"

"But a weapon of multiple destruction was used?"

Ahfred stared at her. The sweat was in his eyes now, and he twitched and blinked to try to clear it.

"A weapon was used?" repeated Ruane. She raised the egg.

"Yes," said Ahfred. "I suppose . . . yes. . . ."

"What was that weapon?"

"Academician Stertour, its inventor, had a most complicated name for it . . . but we called it the Stopper," said Ahfred very slowly. He was being forced to approach both a memory and a part of his mind that he did not want to recall or even acknowledge might still exist.

"What was the nature and purpose of the Stopper?" asked Ruane.

Ahfred's lower lip trembled, and his hands began to shake.

"The Stopper . . . the Stopper . . . was a development of Stertour's sandgrain technology," he said. He could no longer look Ruane in the eyes but instead stared at the floor.

"Continue."

"Stertour came to realize that clockwerk sandgrain artifices could be made to be inimical to other artifices, that it would only be a matter of time before someone . . . an anarchist or radical . . . designed and constructed sandgrain warriors that would act against beneficial clockwerk, particularly the clockwerk in augmented humanity. . . ."

Ahfred stopped. Instead of the pale floorboards, he saw writhing bodies, contorted in agony, and smoke billowing from burning cities.

"Go on."

"I cannot," whispered Ahfred. He felt his carefully constructed persona falling apart around himself, all the noises of the greater world coming back to thrust against his ears, as they sought to surge against his brain. His protective circle of silence, the quiet of the roses, all were gone.

"You must," ordered Ruane. "Tell me about the Stopper."

Ahfred looked up at her.

"I don't want . . . I don't want to remember," he whispered.

"Tell me," ordered Ruane. She raised the egg, and Ahfred remembered the pain in his ears.

"The Stopper was a sandgrain artifice that would hunt and destroy other sandgrain artifices," he said. He did not talk to Ruane, but rather to his own shaking hands. "But it was not wound tightly and would only tick on for minutes, so it could be deployed locally against inimical sandgrain artifices without danger of it . . . spreading."

"But clearly the Stopper did spread, across the world," said Ruane. "How did that happen?"

Ahfred sniffed. A clear fluid ran from one nostril and over his lip.

"There were delivery mechanisms," he whispered. "Older weapons. Clockwerk aerial torpedoes, carded to fly over all significant cities and towns, depositing the Stopper like a fall of dust."

"But why were these torpedoes launched?" asked Ruane. "That is -"

"What?" sniffled Ahfred.

"One of the things that has puzzled us," said Ruane quietly. "Continue."

"What was the question?" asked Ahfred. He couldn't remember what they had been talking about, and there was work to be done in the garden. "My roses, and there is weeding -"

"Why were the aerial torpedoes launched, and who ordered this action?" asked Ruane.

"What?" whispered Ahfred.

Ruane looked at the old man, at his vacant eyes and drooping mouth, and changed her question.

"Two keys were used to open the Ultimate a.r.s.enal," said Ruane. "Whose keys?"

"Oh, I took Mosiah's key while she slept," said Ahfred. "And I had a capture cylinder of her voice, to play to the lock. It was much easier than I had thought."

"What did you do then?" asked Ruane, as easily as asking for a gla.s.s of water from a friend.

Ahfred wiped his nose. He had forgotten the stricture to be still.

"It took all night, but I did it," he said proudly. "I took the sample of the Stopper to the fabrication engine and redesigned it myself. I'm sure Stertour would have been amazed. Rewound, each artifice would last for months, not hours, and I gave it better cilia, so that it might travel so much more easily!"

Ahfred smiled at the thought of his technical triumph, utterly divorcing this pleasure from any other, more troubling, memories.

"From there, the engine made the necessary ammunition to arm the torpedoes. One thousand and sixteen silver ellipsoids, containing millions of lovely sandgrain artifices, all of them sliding along the magnetic tubes, into the torpedoes, so quietly. . . . Then it took but a moment to turn the keys . . . one . . . two . . . three . . . and off they went into the sky -"

"Three keys?" asked Ruane.

"Yes, yes," said Ahfred testily. "Two keys to open the a.r.s.enal, three keys to use the weapons, as it has always been."

"So Distributor Kebediah was present?"

Ahfred looked out the doorway, past Ruane. There were many tasks in the garden, all of them requiring long hours of quiet, contemplative work. It would be best if he finished with this visitor quickly, so he could get back to work.

"Not at first," he said. "I had arranged for her to come. A state secret, I said, we must meet in the a.r.s.enal, and she came as we had arranged. Old comrades, old friends, she suspected nothing. I had a capture cylinder of her voice, too. I was completely prepared. I just needed her key."

"How did you get it?"

"The Stopper!" cackled Ahfred. He clapped his hands on his knees twice in great satisfaction. "Steam skeleton, sandgrain enhancement, she had it all. I had put the Stopper on her chair. . . ."

Ahfred's face fell, and he folded his hands in his lap.

"It was horribly loud," he whispered. "The sound of the artifices fighting inside her, like animals, clawing and chewing, and her screaming, the boiler when the safety valve blew . . . it was unbearable, save that I had my helmet. . . ."

He looked around and added, "Where is my helmet? It is loud here, now, all this talking, and your breath, it is like a bellows, all a-huffing and a-puffing. . . ."

Ruane's face had set, hard and cold. When she spoke, her words came out with slow deliberation.

"How was it you were not affected by the Stopper?"

"Me?" asked Ahfred. "Everyone knows I have no clockwerk enhancement. Oh, no, I couldn't stand it, all that ticking inside me, that constant tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . It was bad enough around me, oh, yes, much too awful to have it inside."

"Why did you fire the torpedoes?" asked Ruane.

"Tell me who you are and I'll tell you," said Ahfred. "Then you may leave my presence, madam, and I shall return to my work . . . and my quiet."

"I am an investigator of what you termed the Rival Nation," said Ruane.

"But there is no Rival Nation," said Ahfred. "I remember that. We destroyed you all in the War of Accretion!"

"All here on Earth," said Ruane. The lines on her neck, that Ahfred had thought tattooes, opened to reveal a delicate layering of blue flukes, which shivered in contact with the air before the slits closed again. "You killed my grandparents, my great-uncles and great-aunts, and all my terrestrial kin. But not our future. Not my parents, not those of us in the far beyond, in the living ships. Long we prepared, myself since birth, readying ourselves to come back, to fight, to regain our ancestral lands and seas, to pit the creations of our minds against your clockwerk. But we found not an enemy, but a puzzle, the ruins of a once great, if misguided, civilization. And in seeking the answer to that puzzle, we have at last found you. I have found you."

"Bah!" said Ahfred. His voice grew softer as he went on. "I have no time for puzzles. I shall call my guards, a.s.sa.s.sin, and you will be . . . you will be . . ."

"Why did you fire the torpedoes?" asked Ruane. "Why did you use the Stopper? Why did you destroy your world?"

"The Stopper," said Ahfred. He shook his head, small sideways shakes, hardly moving his neck. "I had to do it. Nothing else would work, and it just kept getting worse and worse, every day -"

"What got worse?"

Ahfred stopped shaking his head and stood bolt upright, eyes staring, his back rigid, hands clapped to his ears. Froth spewed from between his clenched teeth and cascaded from his chin in pink bubbles, stained with blood from his bitten tongue.

"The noise!" he screamed. "The noise! A world of clockwerk, everybody and everything ticking, ticking, ticking, ticking -"

Suddenly the old man's eyes rolled back. His hands fell, but he remained upright for a moment, as if suspended by hidden wires, then fell forward and stretched out headlong on the floor. A gush of bright blood came from his ears before slowing to a trickle.

It was quiet after the Grand Technomancer fell. Ruane could hear her own breathing and the swift pumping of her hearts.

It was a welcome sound, but not enough, not now. She went outside and took a message swift from her pocket, licking the bird to wake it before she sent it aloft. It would bring her companions soon.

In the meantime, she began to whistle an old, old song.

Luz could see the future, or at least her future. It looked just like the present. The Sat.u.r.day market was slow. This early in the spring, the only produce for sale was green onions and early lettuce, which most of the people in town grew in their own kitchen gardens. Even the stalls selling jars of canned vegetables and preserves from last year weren't doing much business.

She sat in her family's stall, waiting for someone to stop and buy some of her grandmother's canned salsa. At seventeen, Luz had spent every Sat.u.r.day morning she could remember doing the same thing, and unless the worst happened and she was drafted into Federal service when she turned eighteen, then she imagined she would be doing the same thing on all the Sat.u.r.day mornings to come.

Her grandmother sat quietly beside her, knitting a cap for one of Luz's countless cousins. The old cigar box open at their feet had just a few more coins and Federal notes than had been there at first light, when they had rolled up the tarp and set out their jars of salsa and tomato sauce and last year's green beans.

Luz heard a clattering noise in the distance and idly glanced past the low buildings of the square to where the coal balloons were tethered just outside the town limits. Federal treaties with Localists, like the townspeople, kept the government's flying ornithopters from the sky above Lexington, but Feds observed the letters of their agreements, never their spirits. Cl.u.s.ters of canvas balloons strung with thick hemp hawsers hung in the colorless sky. A bra.s.s-winged ornithopter had just landed in the ropes and clung there like a fly on a cow's tale. Someone below, out of sight, set a pulley to working, and skips full of coal began to rise up to feed the hungry machine.

If she did get drafted next year, at least there was a small chance she would fly in one of those machines, though it was more likely that she'd wind up working in the mines. Or, given all her father had taught her about tinkering and her mother about scavenging, she might wind up in the machine yards that were said to spread for hundreds of miles across the eastern states.

"There's better ways to fly," said her grandmother. Luz started and realized she had been staring at the ornithopter for several minutes. Her grandmother continued, "Like on that bicycle there you're always sneaking off to ride."